The 40 hours week of work:
We (employees) probably work 40 hours a week – less all the coffee breaks and chit chat.
We do many things and have multiple experiences during this work week (even boring time consuming meetings).
To be fair: the commuting time to work needs to be added to these 40 hours.

During these 40 business hours we do our work, run the business and gain our income.

The 40 hours weekend:
A weekend lasts a little over 60 hours: from Friday 5 pm to Monday 7pm.
The 3 nights of sleep are consuming about 18 to 21 hours.
This making the amount of time available during a weekend about the same as the entire work week: 40 hours.

During this free time we spend most of our disposable income (or what’s left over after mortgage and utility bills).

Work vs weekend
Seems we have as much time to earn or income as we have time to spend our money.

So what did you do during:
- Last work week ?
- Last weekend ?
Anything significant ? Or just wasting time ?

People have a lot of time to themselves but seem to be more active or effective during business hours.
Make sure you spend your spare-time efficiently and well.
Life is too short to waste your time.

Remarks:
- Many entrepreneurs work almost the entire week by combining the two: working more than the 40 hours.
- The Internet and online businesses are active 24 / 7.

If currently your company or website makes revenue from online ads like Adwords, AdBrite, Bidvertiser, InfoLinks, Chitika, Exit Junction, Clicksor, AdToll, Pogads or Adsense then your business will be doomed as there is a shift from the Internet to the Mobile Internet.

The three facts:
1. Less ads on mobile screens
There is a shift going on from Internet to Mobile Internet use.
However less advertising can be crammed upon a tiny mobile phone screen

2. Limited time for ad exposure
The amount of spare / free time for people to stare at their 19” monitors and 3.5” smart phones is limited as people do need to work, eat and sleep.
Limited means no growth possible and the available ad exposure time gets split-up over Internet and Mobile Internet.

3. Interruption marketing (advertising) is loosing ground
- People are clicking less and less on ads.
- People and technology have become efficient in blocking ads.

Changing to the Mobile Internet is not the solution
Even if you manage to shift your content offering and business from Internet to the Mobile Internet you will be making less money as your operating costs will go up and the number of ads will go down.
At the same time the value of advertisements will decrease as interruption marketing is being overhauled by pull marketing (inbound marketing) and content marketing which are the new kids on the block playing a whole different game.

Even Google
Instead of relying upon ad income you will be forced to change your business model – probably a subscription model for your content ?
Even Google will come under pressure.

What’s your take on this ?

We have 2 websites that are promoting both our web services:
LEADSExplorer: Caller-ID for your website
popupbooster: presenting relevant content visitors: video, ads, affiliate ads, forms, surveys and opt-in.

The first website is more than 2 years older than the second one which should have impact on the visit sources and findability. It also receives about 8 to 9 times more traffic (Alexa #287,000).

We use Google Analytics to have an overview of the traffic, sources and content.
For lead generation we use our own LEADSExplorer which gives visitors data by company.

LEADSExplorer:
	Traffic sources    Although this website is quite longer on the Internet and many links have been created over the years the main source is Google search. The many links have been created by article and presentation publishing, comments on blog posts, press releases and a few blogs writing about the service. No advertising whatsoever since 6 months.
	Web analytics    The bounce rate is high: 77%. This is mainly due to: - The very different content on the website: people end up on web pages not immediately looking for such a solution. - The blog which receives 26% of the visitors. Only 10% will click to the website = 2.6%. The high percentage of new visitors is related to this as well as the short time spend on the website. This partially explains why people only visit 1.97 pages.
	Conversion    The conversion rate to sign-up for free is about 1.6% - Even with the blog stealing 26% of the traffic and only sending 10% of it to the website - Only indicative pricing on the website available.
popupbooster:
	Traffic sources    Although this website is just 6 months on the Internet and much less links has been created the traffic from referring websites is higher. This is mainly due to the high volume of traffic it gets from a free Wordpress plug-in: 18% The links are mainly from comments on blog, presentation publishing and one press release. No advertising at all.
	Web stats The bounce rate is significantly lesser and the time on the website is quite high: 3min 15 The mini blog only gets 2% of the traffic which is not significant. On average people visit 2.92 pages per visit, which is whole page more.
	Conversion rate The conversion rate to sign-up for free is about 1.1% which is lower than the website with the high bounce rate and the popular blog. There is a full pricing page on the site available: so people know the pricing.

We still aim to improve: more visitors and a higher conversion. How well is your website performing ?

Today we launched a new web service for dynamic content targeting: popupbooster

Until now having an existing website to display content tailored to specific groups of visitors was a complex and expensive process.
Popupbooster simplifies this process and allows serving of customized content and messages within minutes at an affordable price.

Benefits

The benefits are multiple:
- serving of relevant, visitor tailored content
- without large upfront investments, major modifications to an existing website – low setup and running costs
- easy customizable
- easy to maintain

Challenging Internet

On the Internet a website has only a few seconds or pages to:
- Capture the visitor’s interest
- Make them stay on the website for more page views: sticky website
- Decrease cart abandonment
- Convince them to make a purchase
- Leave their contact details
- Convert them into leads
- Increase online sales: up-selling, cross-selling, transactional selling

Previously this kind of targeting could only be solved by implementing expensive and complex content management systems (CMS) requiring experienced consultants resulting in hard to rollback changes to the website and expensive invoices.

Popupbooster solves this problem by offering easy to manage, easy to design, flexible popups and overlays that appear on conditions related to:
- The visit characteristics
- The search characteristics
- Reference website
The look, design and feel of each popup/overlay can be specified to your needs.

Beyond popups & overlays

While the idea of popups might trigger memories of spam-infested websites, the rise of these techniques is seen on more than 80% of the top 100 sites where they are implemented as popups, top bars, bottom bars and dynamic overlaying techniques which can range from being very subtle (not recognizable as popup) to aggressive attention-catchers..

Additionally the appearance can be triggered only when certain conditions are met and limiting the number of appearances for avoiding annoyance for the regular visitors while still being engaging to new or otherwise bouncing visitors.

Embedding web services and widgets

Most web services (online forms, surveys, email opt-in), media (Youtube, Scribd, …) and widgets can be embedded with relative ease expanding the possibilities beyond text and images.

Analytics

In order to be able to test different versions of popups and overlays adequate analytics, statistics and click-through recordings are provided.
This instant feedback mechanism and the easy to manage interface allows instant iterations to enhance the message displayed with the goal of the visitor’s engagement.

For more information on popupbooster please visit: www.popupbooster.com where you can sign-up for a 30 day free trial or a limited free account.

The Internet presence

Almost all companies have a website.
At the very least your company should have an Internet presence.
Ideally when people Google your company name they should be able to find your company even in case they just need the contact details or to know how to get to your offices.
Let’s face it: B2B businesses without a website yet are stuck in the dark ages. Moreover the image your company will get is filed as old fashioned.
If someone searches your company name together with county or city and your website doesn’t show up on the first page, it’s as if your company no longer exists. No website then you might be out of business.

The purpose of having a website ?

Why do you have a website ?
- Internet presence ?
- To convert visitors into leads ?
- For branding purposes ?
- As an online brochure in order to explain your products or services ?
- For customer support, providing faqs or a knowledge base ?
Or a combination of the above ?

The website for trust and removing risk

One of the most important roles of a salesman is to take away the risk and build trust. The risk of buying a product or service from a company without trust is not done.
The role of the salesman is not so much explaining the functions, features and benefits of your products or services, but to take away the risk factors and to build trust.

Similarly your website should also take away the risk and build trust with you potential customers who are visiting. The functions and features of products or services are of a secondary importance.
Of course explaining in depth and listing out all the functions and features can help to build trust and take away fear, but is is just one of the many building blocks to build trust.
References, the quality of information on the website, the look of the website, the contact details (address, telephone number and email), case studies and the findability of your website are other aspects to build trust.

Gone are the days when a company just put the office building on their website. In those days the findability and the important building were enough to build trust.
Nowadays the competition has increased thus more is needed to stand out, to build trust and to take away the risk of the decision and the purchase.

Converting visitors into leads into customers

Should you provide just enough enough information, hoping that the visitor gets in touch with your company ? Allowing your sales team to take over the nurturing of the lead ?

Or should your website be a bastion of relevant, up-to-date content and insights with the goal of establishing your company as an authority on these matters or in this industry ?

How far can the website go in the process of conversion from visitor to customer ? When does the salesmen need to take over from the website or can your products be sold entirely completely on the website ?

What’s the purpose of your website ?
Just to explain functions and features of your products?
Or to take away the risk and build trust ?
Or to convert visitors into leads or even into customers ?

These questions need to be answered before starting to develop and design the website and the content.

Online social smalltalk

Inspired by Facebook and Twitter a number of on-demand solution vendors propose to introduce the concept of social websites into the daily operations of sales and marketing by merging a CRM with a social messaging in order to have more direct interaction or more social contact with customers and leads.
Somewhat similar to the social smalltalk at the beginning of a telephone call or a meeting in order to know more about the person sales people are dealing with.

The difference is the smalltalk is controlled related to the beginning of an event and controlled in time whereas the social messaging or chat is rather uncontrolled.

The white noise of social websites

The main problem with social website is the amount of white noise as social messaging is:
- Unstructured
- Without a subject line like email
- Capable of deriving quickly from the subject

All this white noise could derive people from their actual work as it could be more interesting.
Still the work needs to get done while the employees could be wasting their time filtering out the white noise not related to their actual work.
This filtering is already a problem with emails that are contained and classifiable items, whereas social messaging, chats or status reports are unstructured demanding even more time to file.

Customers and leads willing to participate in online social?

Even if your company enables and offers social features the question is if customers and leads will use it as they have to open a social conversation with you.
Are they ready for this?

Social website Return On Investment

Enterprises and corporations need productive operations from their employees that contribute directly or as directly as possible to their bottom line.
This will be hard to proof when employing social websites during work especially as it tends to be apparently unproductive work at first sight.

It could get even worse in case the marketing and sales teams are getting used to the social tool. They could get addicted and use it for all kinds of purposes not always related to marketing, selling or operations.
Work should be fun, but it should not be a waste of time.

It is questionable if the online social talk will be any profitable or improve profitability.
How about all the time wasted on messages that have little or no relation to the business whatsoever?
Calculating a Return On Investment on all the time that has been spend on a social corporate chat or status message board will be hard to do – if not impossible.

Online social websites allowing to interact sales and marketing with customers and leads are likely only to succeed if these social functions could be integrated with features that enhance productivity: for example workflow.

Will you take advantage of integrated social functions and features of your CRM?
Will your customers or leads use the online social conversation possibilities offered by your company?

Social as the new SEO

The year 2009 might be remembered as the turning point for Internet as the social techniques – social media have become the new SEO for marketing websites.
Previously the black art of traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) where
- Keywords, meta tags, description, internal links in the website
- The Page Rank defined by the importance of links
Ruled the game and were the measurement for the findability of any website.

Most of these parameters could be kept under control by the company or website owner. In most cases spending more money would mean higher SERP rankings.

Real-time and social media

Since the rise of Blogs, forums and Twitter the traditional SEO is no longer.

The democracy of the Internet is now more important:
The more people talk about your website, brand, products, solutions or services the higher you will rank.

The number of mentions on the Internet is taken as indicator of popularity and importance.
Even if people post negative reviews and comments about your brand or products, the ranking in search results will increase.

Additionally the real-time has become even more important as there is a war ongoing between Twitter, Bing and Google to present the most relevant and up-to-date (real-time) information in their searches.

Democracy of the Internet

On the other hand people both at home as consumers and in companies use the Internet to find solutions to their problems, demands or needs, will select possible brands or vendors on the Internet and could even make decisions for buying using the Internet.
All without any interference of company sales people!
Reviews, advices and comments on social media have become most important in purchase decisions in B2C and B2B.
This is the democracy of the Internet with the evolution to social media marketing.

These changes pose a tremendous problem for marketing and brand managers as they are no longer in control and throwing massive amounts of money on advertising will not show up in search engine results or even generate more interest from potential customers.
It is time to take a walk on the wild side of marketing: social media marketing.

The interruption-marketing using interruptive-advertising (display ads) are no longer the success formula as people get better in blocking them out. Still these marketing methods will stay in existence: direct mail, broadcast advertising (radio, tv), billboards, print advertising, …

Social media brings data overload

Disruptive change brings the new problem of figuring out how to leverage and use all the possible social techniques and social media available for reaching the potential customers. It is not just learning to use all the tools of social media as it is also about optimizing the social media techniques for customer awareness and customer acquisition.

Using social media is very time consuming as individual people need to be behind every statement or information that is published on the Internet.
Moreover as the produced and published amounts of information and data about a brand or product are becoming massive, it cannot be controlled by a company any more. It is data overload.

The damage control is even harder to do as just one person can publish negative information that will spread faster than positive news or information.

The challenges for marketing and brand managers just got almost impossible thanks to real-time social media that have become premium importance for Google, Bing and Twitter.

The disruptive social media will change your marketing for ever.

Although we believe in our product (and our customers seem to do so too), we feel the path from website visitor -> to free trial user customer is suboptimal and could / should be improved.
There are enough website visitors; still we have a feeling that the conversion rate could be higher. In order to know you need to measure and to compare different alternatives.

Most visitors either land on our homepage (about 24%), or enter our site through a landing page and pass in many occasions to the homepage during their visit. In any case their next visit will almost certainly start from the home page.

Due to this importance of the home page it is logical we try to enhance the home page. Thus a new home page layout was cooked up based on the original layout.

So far we only changed the top part (above the fold) to be more focused and clean:
- Less information thus more straightforward.
- Less distraction of too many items
- Less keywords in the top fold
- Less screen shots
We’re planning on taking small steps at a time, making sure each step can be measured.

Google Website Optimizer

We placed the 2 pages head to head using Google Website Optimizer, using the free trial page as the goal.

Google Website Optimizer is a free service from Google that enables you to test different pages or parts of pages and find out which converts better.
As you need to be able to make changes to your web pages, so some technical knowledge is required but GWO (as it’s often called) helps you through the process.

The Results

More than the double amount of visitors who passed by the new homepage went on to visit the free trial compared to the original homepage! (Though not sure how many of them will become paying customers – that we’ll see that later on)

When examining the difference between the 2 visitor segments in Google Analytics we were in for even more of a surprise:
The bounce rate has improved 12%: 63% vs 67% (vs 75% for the whole site) -> From 33% to 37% is a 12% improvement!

On the other hand the visitors entering by the new home page spend on average 44% less time during a visit, and visit 17% less pages! This is bizarre – does that mean they are less engaged? Or they understand faster the purpose of LEADSExplorer?
On the contrary, my dear Watson: New visitor rate: 74% vs 89% – a 15% improvement! This means visitors who see the new homepage are more likely to visit multiple times!

Conclusion

People watch less pages and leave our site earlier.
However a lot more of them come back later to continue visiting our site and eventually ask a free trial, or are convinced earlier in their visit to request a free trial.
This is reflected in the ‘Visitor Loyalty’ view of Google Analytics, which really shows a ‘long tail’ of repeat visitors for the new homepage.

Where should we focus next when optimizing our site?
How can we improve the flow from home page or landing page to the free trial?
What makes people decide to sign-up for a free trial?

What are your experiences with Google Website Optimizer?

E-commerce: consumer

Consumer goods have been available on the Internet since the early beginnings of the Internet: e-Commerce was all the hype during the Internet Bubble. The website were and are about consumer goods and consumer web services (in many cases related to the action of buying consumer goods).

Online selling Internet BtoB services

Since a few years during the Web 2.0 era a new breed of e-Commerce sites have emerged: web services for businesses.

Previously all business to business services required a physical presence of a sales rep. or even a sales team in order to sell.
As the Internet has infiltrated business and web services are being promoted and provided over the Internet without human interaction or interference this change of trend just has happened.
In order to enable selling business to business the web services have become specialized or specific services with a minimum of functions and features.
Instead of promoting a complex ERP system with (too) many functions and functionalities (for buyers to fully grasp) solutions with only one or two business processes are being offered: CRM, collaboration, invoicing, lead generation or cash management.

The process of marketing and sales can be completely automated as:
- The marketing message is less complex due to the limited number of business functions
- Marketing is done using the Internet presence: website, advertising, blogs, reviews, and email campaigns (spam)
- Companies are identified while visiting the website
- Selling is limited to answering emails and providing a sign-up page with a payment scheme.
No man to man interaction required except for the email conversations.

Online marketing

As the current method of getting a solution for a problem in a business is mainly started by a search on the Internet, the Internet presence is most important.
The online marketing consists of:
- The website with content related to the problems the business service solves.
- The well positioned advertising of companies
- The social media marketing – even for BtoB
- The email campaigns

All the online content has become more important for the decision than any other marketing channel for attracting interested parties which are the potential customers. They will visit the website if the vendor throughout the entire buying process.

In order to attract Internet buyer-searchers the content and multiple presences on the Internet are king.
Both Outbound and Inbound marketing have theirs place. However there is a bias or preference towards Inbound Marketing as:
- Inbound marketing is always active instead of the on/off functionality of Outbound marketing.
- Inbound marketing has a broader reach.

Selling by a salesman is not really required for these web service providers.
The persuasion by the content and the presence on the Internet have become more important for engaging the potential customers.

No death of a Salesman for complex solutions

For solutions offering just one or two business services or functions the death of a Salesman is near.
However in all cases with greater complexity of the solution provided the greater need for human interaction by salesmen: discussions, interactions and meetings.
If the service is too complex the Internet is not yet convincing enough.
Still all decision makers and buyers will visit the website of the vendor during the entire sales process.

The online B2B Sales currently is only feasible for relatively simple and straightforward solutions and services limiting to one or 2 business processes only.
The question is how far the bar will be raised: up to what level of complexity people in business will buy without human interaction?

Currently most companies are still selling the traditional way.
The question is how long will this traditional selling last as the Internet has become ubiquitous and will move up the ladder of complexity of business services offered?

Has your BtoB sales already been affected by the Internet?
Will the Internet kill the salesman?

Kill the CPM!

Let’s kill the CPM (Cost Per Mille of online ads – cost per thousand impressions) is an interesting post written by Shelby Bonnie – The CEO of Whiskey Media – on TechCrunch.

Marketers, agencies and publishers are all in the ban of CPM.
He explains that CPM is not relevant anymore as page impressions are not in relation to interest from people. Moreover the metric of CPM can be changed easily by the publishers as they can increase the number of ads on their website.

Kill advertising instead?

However as he states in the article: people being bombarded with advertising every day CPM doesn’t matter anymore.

Maybe CPM isn’t the problem.
Advertising itself has / might have become the problem.

People are overwhelmed by advertising:
- Broadcast: The TV commercials getting zapped away for other content
- Print: ad pages are turned over quickly
- Internet: Online ads are ignored as we filter them out visually
- Post: Direct mails are field vertically
- Emails: Emails are deleted by the receiver as only a few are relevant
- Outdoor: Billboards still get attention because of boredom of that moment
- Product placement: Brand awareness at a high cost

Viral marketing campaigns have been successful for only a handful of companies reaching a large audience. An audience that might not always be the intended target market.

Not only the overwhelming presence of advertising but also the credibility of ads will not help their impact as more and more people have disbelieve and turn away.
These matters have become the fundamental problems for advertising:
- Nobody takes notice
- Nobody believes anymore the messages
Then why not just kill advertising?

Outbound vs Inbound marketing

Can we kill advertising?
Not really as branding and creating awareness is still important.
However the importance given and the amounts of money spend on advertising should be reduced in favor of other means and methods that generate attention like content marketing.

Instead of outbound marketing, inbound marketing is increasing in importance as people want to find and explore themselves solutions to their problems.
Of course this will demand another set of tools and solutions in order to cope with the change from outbound to inbound marketing.

Is CPM dictating your marketing?
Could you do without advertising?
What will you benefit the most of in the near future: outbound or inbound marketing?